What the .com price increase in 2026 means for your domain portfolio

The 2026 .com price increase is here. On November 1, 2026, Verisign will raise the wholesale registry fee for every new, renewed, and transferred .com domain from $10.26 to $10.97. That is $0.71 more per domain-year, or roughly 6.9%, and it applies to every .com transaction you place after 04:00 UTC that day.

The part worth acting on sits in the contract rather than the announcement. Every .com renewed before November 1 is billed at today’s price for the full term you buy, up to 10 years. So this is less a price shock than a deadline attached to a decision you were always going to make about your renewal book.

The Verisign price increase on November 1, 2026

Verisign gave formal notice of the increase in April 2026, satisfying the six-month notice period written into its .com Registry Agreement with ICANN. That agreement also obliges the registry to keep offering terms of up to ten years at the current price right up to the cutover.

The new fee applies to initial registrations, renewals, and inbound transfers, since a transfer adds a year to the registration term and is billed like a renewal. Separately, ICANN’s per-transaction fee moved from $0.18 to $0.20 on July 1, 2025. That fee sits on top of the registry fee, so the underlying industry cost of a .com year becomes roughly $11.17 from November, before any registrar margin.

The .com wholesale price ladder

The rhythm is contractual, not commercial. Verisign may raise .com by up to 7% in four of every six years, and the current six-year period began in October 2024 and runs to November 2030. 2025 was a capped year, which makes this November the first of up to four permitted increases in the cycle.

If the registry takes its full allowance each remaining year, wholesale .com lands somewhere near $13.40 before the cycle closes. Verisign does not forecast its own pricing, so read that as a ceiling rather than a prediction. Either way, modeling a .com book on flat registry costs is modeling the wrong number.

The price increase impact on renewals for domain resellers

For most domain resellers, .com is not a product line. It sits underneath hosting, email, DNS, and SSL as the record everything else attaches to, which makes registry cost a recurring input to a recurring revenue stream. A $0.71 step lands on every renewal, in every year, for as long as the customer stays.

Acquisition price is where the industry argues, and renewal price is where margin is actually decided. A promotional first year wins an account once. The renewal book pays for the business, compounds across the lifetime of every customer, and quietly absorbs every registry increase you do not plan for.

What early renewal is worth on your portfolio

Each domain-year renewed before November 1 saves $0.71 against the same year renewed afterward. The following table estimates the compounding effect of this increase.

Read the columns as domain-years, not domains.

A 1,000 domain book extended by two years locks $1,420, and the same book taken to five years locks $3,550. The saving is banked at the moment of renewal rather than spread across the term.

The domain renewal price increase impact on cash flow

Renewing early ties up working capital. Five years of a 1,000 domain .com book costs roughly $51,300 at today’s price, paid now instead of annually, and that is a real constraint on a smaller balance sheet.

The sensible filter is retention certainty, not portfolio size. Domains attached to customers on long contracts, managed services, or your own DNS and mail are worth extending, because you already know they will still be there. Single-project names and dormant registrations are not, and multi-year renewal should stay an option rather than a default.

How to renew in bulk before November 1

Bulk renewal is only ever as easy as your portfolio visibility. If .com domains sit across three registrars and two billing systems, the first job is not renewal, it is establishing how many you hold and when they expire. That reconciliation work is exactly where fragmented setups leak margin, staff hours, and the occasional missed expiry that turns into a support escalation.

In the Reseller Control Panel

1. Open your domain list in the Reseller Control Panel and filter by .com.
2. Apply an expiry filter covering the next 12 to 24 months, then sort by expiration date.
3. Select the domains you want to extend and choose the bulk renewal action.
4. Set the renewal term, check the total against your account balance, and confirm.

Via the API

For API-first teams the same job is a scripted loop rather than a screen. Pull your .com domains with the domain listing endpoint, filter locally on expiration date, then call the renew endpoint with your chosen period. Request and response formats live in the API documentation.

Build two things into the script before you run it. A dry run that prints the total cost without spending anything, and a log of every domain and term renewed, so finance can reconcile the pull-forward against next year’s expected revenue.

Cost price is what makes the math work

Every figure above assumes you pay the registry fee and nothing on top of it. That is what an Openprovider Membership provides: domains billed at the price the registry charges, with nothing inserted between the registry and your invoice.

Without cost-price access, part of the $0.71 you are protecting ends up somewhere other than your margin. With it, the saving stays yours, and so does every registry price movement for the rest of the term.

If you are not on a Membership yet, you can create a free account and compare plans well before the deadline.

Pricing you can plan around

The registry increase is one story, but the real question is: how many .com domains do we hold, when do they expire, and what does extending them cost? Teams that cannot answer that will discover their exposure in December, one invoice at a time.

Registry prices will keep moving on a schedule you do not control.

What you do control is where the portfolio lives, what you pay for it, and how fast you can act when the number changes. If your .com book runs into the thousands, talk to our team about mapping your exposure before the window closes.

Frequently asked questions

How much is the .com price increase in 2026?

The wholesale registry fee rises from $10.26 to $10.97 per year, an increase of $0.71 or about 6.9%. Retail prices vary by registrar, since each one sets its own margin on top.

When does the .com price increase take effect?

November 1, 2026 at 04:00 UTC. Transactions placed before that moment are billed at $10.26.

Does the increase apply to renewals and transfers?

Yes. It covers new registrations, renewals, and inbound transfers, because a transfer adds a year to the registration term and is billed like a renewal.

Can I lock in the current .com price before the increase?

Yes. The .com Registry Agreement allows registrations and renewals of up to ten years total term at the price in effect when the order is placed, right up to the cutover.

Does the increase affect new .com registrations?

Yes. Every new .com registration placed from November 1 is billed at the higher registry fee for each year of the term.

Will .com prices keep rising after 2026?

Very likely. Verisign may raise .com by up to 7% in four of every six contract years, and the current cycle runs to November 2030. Three further increases are permitted after this one.

Is the ICANN fee included in that price?

No. ICANN’s per-transaction fee of $0.20 is charged separately on top of the registry fee.